The amount of computation required for media processing such as compression, decompression, and other media processing of digitized image data, audio data, etc., is very large. Thus, specialized hardware, high performance digital signal processors (DSP), etc., for performing such media processing, are in widespread use.
Regarding such media processing, a very large number of standards are in use: MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (MPEG is short for Moving Picture Experts Group), H.263, H.264, etc. Thus, digital audio-visual (AV) equipment is required to handle media processing using multiple standards. Further, the complexity of media processing applications is tending to increase, and image size, number of audio channels, etc., are all tending to increase, and therefore the amount of computation required is increasing.
Accordingly, increased media processing performance is achieved by using a high-performance processor provided with a coprocessor specialized in specific computations, which greatly increases computational efficiency.
In a multi-processor system that includes a coprocessor, when there is no software data dependency and no hardware resource conflict between processing at the main processor and processing at the coprocessor, performance is further increased by simultaneously executing the processing at the main processor and the processing at the coprocessor.
For example, Patent Literature 1 discloses setting execution modes of a main processor and a coprocessor (a floating-point number processing unit (FPU)) and causing instructions execution operations of the processors to change. According to Patent Literature 1, instruction execution modes (serial or scalar) of the main processor and the coprocessor (FPU) are matched, such that when floating-point instructions (assigned to the coprocessor) are to be executed, a control is performed of matching the instruction execution mode of the main processor with the instruction execution mode of the coprocessor (FPU). Thus, processing by the main processor and the coprocessor is performed at the same time.